My favorite new academic blog is Good Enough Professor about teaching and scholarship in the humanities, with many lessons for scientists, and everybody else, too.

What should a manuscript review look like? The British Ecological Society put together a great pamphlet for novice reviewers (it’s a pdf.). It also would be great for giving to someone outside academia who wants to really understand what “peer-reviewed” means.

Some education reform knuckleheads want to impose a “college readiness exam” on students enrolled in college before they can receive a federal Pell grant. Tressie Cottom explains how this is as paternalistic and a back-door discriminatory filter like a poll tax: “If you know the kind of racialized, gendered and classist segregation that defines who is and who is not “college ready” AND you concede by ideological imperative that knowledge is a type of capital, then what is a readiness test, exactly?”